lcrw 27-final-interior-for-mobi-newfile

by 2011-08 (mobi)

  “Yes. There is so much of the world,” Tanga has said very little of her journey to their home, outside of scattered references to dark and cold, confusion and cheating, all of it culminating the plush comfort of the New Jersey Transit. She tended to go on about the Jersey Transit, the brightly colored upholstery, the plentiful leg room. It made Gwen ashamed that whenever she rode such trains she kept a tight grip on her purse and packed antiseptic wipes.

  “You must have left much behind.”

  “The things here are not like the things in my home. Here you have machines for juice and bread and peeling. And such wonderful things for cleaning,” Tanga speaks of sponges and roach motels in more detail than the customs of her homeland. Gwen Rogers suspects that Malanesia is a land of many bugs.

  “I think she likes me,” Gwen says in the bed that night.

  “It’s her job to like you.”

  “She’s very helpful.”

  “It’s her job to be helpful.”

  “Joe, she’s more than helpful. She puts herself into the job. I think she cares.”

  “Wish I felt that way about my work,” snorts Joe.

  “Tanga’s from a different culture.”

  “So hard work makes her happy?” Joe touches his wife’s hair. It is not a fight. They are a couple who enjoy spirited discussion. They sometimes vote differently in presidential elections.

  “I hope she’s happy,” says Gwen, “Don’t you?”

  “I just hope she continues not to kill us in our sleep.”

  “Tanga is a very gentle person,” says Gwen, “You should try to get to know her.”

  “Sure.” Joe falls asleep easily; he’s almost there now.

  Gwen is wide awake. She’s thinking of a story Tanga told Jessie, trying to commit it to memory. It went like this: Once upon a time, a tiger came to the home of a family at the edge of the village. They were going to attack it with spears, but it pled with them, saying it was not a tiger but an enchanted princess, and meant them no harm. The family took the tiger in and promised to help her in her quest to break the enchantment. For years, no solution was found, but the tiger grew alongside their own daughters, giving them rides on her back and protecting them from thieves and wild dogs. Then one day the family heard of a powerful sorceress (Gwen pictured grand naked breasts festooned in necklaces). But the family had grown fond of their tiger and no longer wished to see her transformed. So, instead of the real sorceress, they bring an imposter to pronounce some mumbo-jumbo over the tiger. Somehow the hoax is revealed and the tiger winds up eating the family, daughters and all. The princess transforms but retains the power to become a tiger. They say she still stalks the forests of Malanesia in her various forms.

  Gwen thinks there might be a little of the tiger in her.

  “Tanga is very wise, in her own way. Promise you’ll make an effort to know her better.”

  “Promise.”

  Rick had it figured out.

  “The way I figure, I’m not gonna bust my ass nine to five all year when I can get it all done in one season. One fucking season pushing cheeba with the nutty buddies, every now and then pumping a legit fro-yo for some idiot from the city who doesn’t know the deal. I stay out from under the Man’s thumb all winter, free to be. And in the summer, plenty of discount cheeba and fro-yo.”

  Lexie looked up from the pipe to show she was listening. Rich collected pipes. This one looked like a dragon, bellowing out of a protuberant lower lip.

  Rick’s U.N. listened and nodded, though some of them looked confused.

  “Rick’s U.N.” was the frequently invoked nickname for the entourage of foreigners he had met working at the shore. They were summer people, imported to serve America’s sugary snacks and mop America’s roller coaster vomit.

  “Jersey kids are getting too spoiled for summer jobs on the boardwalk, but you guys aren’t too good for it. You guys are what the so-called American dream is really about, right?”

  “Greatest summer of my life, ay?” slurred an Aussie, who was still wearing the blue nylon tie of a Ferris wheel attendant, “Are there any more of those Cheetos?”

  “Is great opportunity,” said a sleepy-eyed blonde from Ukraine. She was known to seek weekly prescriptions for the morning-after pill from the Wonder Land medic, “Not like home.”

  “I’m taking sacks of the Cheetos back at the end of the summer,” the freckly Irish boy had recently lost his virginity to a succession of tattooed American teens who Loved His Accent, “Cheetos are lovely.”

  “To new friends, new discoveries, and conquering the fucking world,” the Aussie raised his beer can.

  Rick nodded toward Lexie to make sure she was benefiting from the multicultural buffet of stoned youth. Rick and Lexie met six months before when he walked up to her at a concert and stared hard into her face, really studying her. “What are you?” he finally said. Lexie was flattered, both by the attention and by the way he’d noticed her hint of ethnicity. Since she moved in with Rick she’d started lining her eyes to bring emphasis their faint slant.

  “I’m not too spoiled to work on the boardwalk,” said Lexie, “I’m in hiding.”

  “Doesn’t seem like there’s much of a search party.” Rick popped another beer and offered a mispronounced Slovak toast he had learned from the other girl he was sleeping with.

  Jessie Rogers places Halloween at the top of the holiday pantheon. Christmas means a new batch of books and educational toys. Birthdays mean a gathering of her parents’ friends’ children and maybe a smelly pony on a tether. But Halloween is the one time of year her mother allows candy into the house and it is coming soon.

  Jessie runs around the house perforating a war whoop with the palm of her hand. In the kitchen, Tanga is seasoning a halpa-based stew. Gwen Rogers is wearing glasses and writing checks. She pinches the top of her nose as Jessie and her noise shoot through the kitchen. Jessie will be pretending to be a Native American for Halloween, Gwen explains.

  “Jessie is not,” Tanga’s voice grows hushed, “American?”

  Gwen laughs, though later she will wish she hadn’t. Later, over a glass of wine she will wonder aloud to Joe what Tanga makes of their careless laughter. She will wonder aloud why her laughter is so much more plentiful than her amusement. Joe will rub her shoulders and pour a little more Sancerre.

  For now, she can only explain what is meant by “Native American.” She tries to do this fairly, not leaving out the parts about bead trades and broken treaties and smallpox blankets.

  Tanga takes this in and ventures cautiously, “Americans must be very strong to defeat these natives. Your people are wily…like coyote.”

  Gwen frowns. She doubts that coyotes are native to Malanesia. Has Tanga been allowing Jessie to watch cartoons? She will speak to her about it later.

  Jessie joins the conversation to explain about the candy candy candy.

  Gwen tries to explain about costumes and the origins of Halloween.

  “So I guess it does have its origins in Satanic…or at least pagan…practices. Of course, it’s supposed to scare people a little, and there will be people wearing horns…” Gwen begins to wonder whether she ought not to have laughed at that Baptist family across the street who won’t let their children trick or treat.

  “We also have bad spirits in my country,” says Tanga, “We put out a bowl of milk to keep them happy.”

  “Like Santa?” says Jessie.

  “If they have milk for drinking, the spirits become fat and pleased. They do not hurt you then.”

  Gwen strokes her daughter’s warm hair in case she is frightened by talk of spirits. Jessie brushes away the manicured fingers and resumes her ambush of the first floor. Later she will ask for a bowl of milk to be placed by her bed. This new ritual is noted and appreciated by the cat, who comes in the dead of the night to empty the bowl.

  Lexie liked hiding out at Rick’s every day. In case the police were looking for a Goth, she tanned on Rick’s roof. She was surprisingly good at t
anning. On cloudy days, she got high and watched soap operas, trying to predict the next line.

  “Get out of my house you manipulative bitch!” Almost verbatim.

  It was the stagnating dramas of the daytime heroines (Emmanuela still hadn’t told Luke the baby was his, Sabrina continued comatose) that inspired Lexie to run again. Rick was out teaching a Slovak and Irish contingent how to bowl.

  Lexie clipped the lock on the secret refrigerator, loaded all the plastic bags into Triscuit boxes, and caught the train to New York.

  She made her first sale to another runaway on the train. Annika, who’d transferred to the Manhattan-bound line from the suburban Philadelphia system. Annika said her step-dad wanted to rape her and that she was the one who got sent to counseling where all they did was dope you up.

  “Sucks,” said Lexie, as if she’d heard it all before.

  “You got a place to stay up there?” said Annika. She was continually clacking her tongue piercing across the white picket fence of her teeth.

  “Port Authority souvenir store, most likely,” Lexie hated the clacking. Still, Annika was the kind of girl people noticed, button nose and blond dreadlocks, sexy smoker’s voice.

  “You wanna stay with me at the W? I’ve got a credit card.”

  “Maybe,” Lexie shrugged.

  She eventually accepted. It was funny how Annika assumed Lexie had never stayed at the W before. She must look destitute. They drank a tray of martinis in a blue velvet booth and told pieces of their life stories, mostly funny stuff about being wasted.

  Lexie refused to say why she had left home. She kept to herself the fact that she had always been a straight-A student with a very clean room (sans maid—her allowance had been contingent upon housework). In fifth grade, she played an orphan in a local repertory’s production of Oliver! She’d belted out “Consider Yourself” and “I’d Do Anything” and her dad had bought her flowers and they went out for ice cream and she announced with certainty that she was going to grow up to be a famous actress. No one had contradicted her.

  Sometime in the vicinity of eighth grade she stopped thinking her father’s jokes were funny. She threw a loafer out a second story window. She realized that her parents had no black friends and that they were vaguely bothered by the situation but did nothing to change it.

  For a while, Lexie soothed her inner turmoil by sitting at the Asian kids’ lunch table. They talked about how much they hated when people assumed they were shy, smart, and good. One Monday they were full of stories about huffing keyboard cleaner in Grace’s basement and Lexie realized that she was the only one who hadn’t been invited. Plus, no one ever assumed she was smart or good. She had a gene or two in common, but she still didn’t belong.

  She spoke to the school counselor, who gave her a Diet Pepsi and some pamphlets. Then Lexie realized that she came from The Most Cliché Family Ever and worse, that hers was a Typical Adolescent Response.

  Things felt better now. Deliciously atypical. Lexie slept in a fortress of expensive pillows while in the next bed Annika fucked the bartender who hadn’t asked them for ID.

  The bed in the yellow room upstairs is the largest the Rogers have ever owned. It is the largest bed on the market and it has been specially designed to prevent one sleeper from detecting the presence of another. Gwen has had her side specially reinforced to improve her posture.

  On the softer side of the bed, Joe begins to have thoughts about Tanga. He supposes it has something to do with her genuine servility. At the office he is catered to by a cadre of secretaries, mail clerks, and interns, but their contempt for their duties is thinly concealed. They have condos and spouses and happy hours in which to deposit their million grievances. Tanga has only the room over the garage, with its narrow bed and electric kettle.

  Tanga makes dinner almost every night, even if Gwen orders Thai food (which Jessie refuses to eat). Tonight it was chicken thighs baked in halpa. He had not meant to drop his fork, but when he did Tanga bent at the waist to pick it up.

  After light’s out, Joe recalls Tanga’s small, round, effortless hindquarters. You never see Tanga pausing and contorting before reflective surfaces the way Gwen does. He pictures Gwen’s mirror face, the way she sucks in her cheeks just slightly. Daily half-hours on the treadmill are not part of Tanga’s value system. After all, Joe thinks, the life of a domestic worker is itself a treadmill. He needs a glass of water and wishes sleepily that Tanga would somehow bring him one.

  It didn’t take long for Lexie to begin to learn behaviors that would help her survive in New York. She had a system of couches in rotation. They were in apartments owned by girls who had fled to New York with their parents’ consent and financial assistance, girls who acted like they were in an amusing play with wonderful costumes. There seemed to be more of them than there were natives, artists, and immigrants combined. Girls like Leora and Jenn, who liked to watch Lexie eat.

  “We’ll order you a pizza,” said Leora, who lived off vodka sodas and a synthetic ice cream product widely available in the city.

  “You need the energy,” said Jenn, who did not trust the synthetic ice cream. She ate only dry salads, though when she was black-out drunk she bought canned ravioli from the bodega downstairs.

  Lexie kept them entertained with stories of her life on the streets. She claimed to have fled an arranged marriage in a Lebanese pocket of Queens. Even now, her bloodthirsty uncles were combing streets, hoping to carry out an honor killing. Jenn and Leora shivered with delight. They were from Michigan.

  Lexie rode the subways. She became involved with an artist and slept in his studio in a neighborhood

  optimistically called Williamsburg, actually miles east of Williamsburg. A Hasidic stronghold. If it had a name it was spoken privately among the men with beards and hats and pungent full-length coats in the middle of July. The artist claimed that Orthodox couples had sex through a hole in a sheet. Lexie longed to make eye contact with them, but when she sat next to them on the subway in her tank top and shorts, they shifted away.

  Then artist’s parents cut off his account at Pearl Paint. He was flirting with actual poverty. He asked Lexie to what extent she thought the artness of art depended upon its material existence.

  Lexie considered what answer he might want to hear.

  “Anyone can make things,” she said. She told him how her mother made things. Her hobby was making pickles out of other pickles. There were vats of pupating pickles in cabinets and under stairs. The license plate on the Volvo: “PICKLED.” On the Mercedes: “PICKLD2.”

  “Whoa,” he said, “Pickles into pickles? That’s a total mind-fuck.”

  “I think of it as a symbol of futility,” said Lexie. You could say things like that in this section of Williamsburg. Hopeless dispatches from the Land of Lawns.

  Her parents were Protestant. They hardly ever told Lexie they loved her. They barely spoke to each other. When things were especially bad or especially good she was taken out for ice cream. Lexie suddenly thought fondly of that old scene, a suburban Baskin Robbins, bubblegum ice cream on a cone, her father awkwardly congratulating her on her A’s or explaining that Bobo Dog could not come back from the vet this time. He tried not to say so, but her dad was clearly disgusted with the way she methodically spit the crunchy little tiles of gum into a napkin, saving them for the end.

  She did not know if her father had been given ice cream when his own mother died; he might have been too young. Lexie’s paternal grandmother was some kind of refugee, Laotian or Vietnamese, but she had died early. The grandfather had remarried a woman named Barb who sold snowman figurines at craft fairs. Grandma Barb was the only member of the family Lexie liked, so she’d never asked about her predecessor.

  Lexie wandered away from the artist and went back to Jenn and Leora for a few days. At least there she could drown herself in expensive bath products, the same kind her mother used to buy when an impersonal present was called for. Long baths helped Lexie to consider her next move. Which sho
uld probably take place before the water bill arrived.

  The Rogers build a deck and throw a party to celebrate. It is to be mock-casual, Gwen tells Tanga.

  “Gourmet versions of casual food,” Gwen explains before the guests arrive. As an example, she cites the sausages, which are of the imported Spanish variety rather than the traditional American grilling sausage, which is actually Italian or Polish in origin…here Gwen’s brow creases. It is complicated. She asks Tanga to sample the sausage. Tanga approves.

  The Rogers have not specifically asked Tanga to serve their guests, but, as usual, she has uncanny powers of intuition. Tanga circulates food and drink with downcast eyes, invisible in plain sight. The guests are impressed, but say nothing to break the spell.

  Still, the party is not all the Rogers had hoped. The sangria is not strong enough. Conversations seem grounded. A moth has died in the olive tapenade.

  When they have a moment in the kitchen, Joe comments that Alice Blair was more fun when she drank.

  “She’s pregnant, Joe.”

  “Maybe she could make an exception? She used to be the life of the party.”

  Gwen shrugged, “The party will have to find a new life.”

  “How about you?” Joe’s tone is bitter. He heads to the deck with a tray of cheeses and sliced rustic bread. Gwen mentally tabulates his beer consumption.

  Back outside, Joe steps through the invisible shield and offers Tanga a glass of sangria.

  Tanga looks at the deck below her feet and the dying grass below the deck. “I do not drink…wine.” She excuses herself to check on Jessie. In Tanga’s culture, children are not sent to the periphery of a social gathering with a coloring book and washable markers.

  Gwen has an inadvisable third sangria. She shares an inadvisable confidence with Lorie Murphy, who could get her fired. She wants to be fired.

  There are things people do not know about Gwen Rogers. Before she met Joe, a man she was dating had dumped her on the eve of a holiday weekend. While he was away, she turned up the heat in his house and placed raw tuna steaks between his couch cushions. She had always wanted to tell someone this story, but knew it fell in a certain category. Certainly she had never told Joe, who allegedly admired her cool-headedness.